


Fallen at the Low Tide

by ag_sasami



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-10
Updated: 2011-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami/pseuds/ag_sasami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't the haze of battle of which John still dreams.</p><p>Slashy if you squint even just a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallen at the Low Tide

There were bones under the floorboards. Fact. Accurate memory. The killer had stripped them clean, bleached them white, and piled them with an incongruous amount of care beneath a loose board near the wall. Sherlock smiled, teeth white beneath his lips and bright even against his pale skin. Each bone he turned carefully between his fingers, and they were John’s bones. His own bones buried beneath a stranger’s floor and Sherlock is running his hands over them with reverence.

The floor is filled with sand, hot and sun-baked, and just out of reach his fellow soldier is turned to look at him. His face is missing and he grins vacant from his _whitewhite_ skull. Fact. Accurate memory. There was a bullet in his brain—when he had one still—before he was bleached and grinning at John. His jaw cracks, dislocates, fails to engage as he says hello. Says, “Tom, I thought you left us.” He tries anyway and his bone-voice is a wail, harsh and broken and distraught in a way that echoes painfully through his ribs. His xiphoid process. His sternum.

He only wanted to speak with his old friend but now Tom’s skull is laughing and Sherlock’s teeth are shaking out with a rattle.  John feels it in his bones beneath the floor. And he wants out but his arms won’t cooperate—can’t make the radius and ulna and humerus work together to climb out—and the bones of his wrists are grinding together _just so_.

Fact. There are hands clamped tight around his wrists. His joints ache from thrashing and his shirt is stuck to him cold and damp. The rattle is his own teeth, his own shaking breath hysterical. But Sherlock releases him as he bolts upright. Gasping breaths indistinguishable from sobs, tangled with the cold panic-chatter of his teeth. All he sees is the laughter of clean skulls behind his eyes, so he leaves them wet wide open.

Sherlock’s hands are warm—bird bones safely wrapped in pale flesh—cautious against his skin as he works the sweat-soaked tee up and off, throwing it somewhere on the floor. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark and barely touching, he presses his face into John’s shoulder—curls startlingly soft against John’s neck—and whispers, “John.” A litany into his salt skin. It vibrates through John’s shattered scapula and lodges itself in the marrow, like soft hands on a skeleton in the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "bones." Lyrical title pulled from "Bones" by Editors.


End file.
